Probably one of my favorite things about Fallout 76 is finding outfits in the game to wear. I’m not even going to glance at the overpriced cash shop for these because I pick up plenty as I’m going about my adventures. Today’s nifty find was a paramedic outfit. Wee-ohh, wee-ohh, I’m commin’ to rescue you!

It’s hard to explain the appeal of this game, as there’s just as much I don’t like about it as I do. I guess that at the core of it is a semi-relaxing exploration experience of this not-too-drab post-apocalyptic setting, and I enjoy gradually uncovering locations and seeing what’s what in them. Environmental storytelling is pretty interesting to me, even if I leave an area not quite knowing what happened there.

Fallout 76 might be best subtitled as “Clubbing Robots to Death.” That’s what I seem to spend a lot of my time doing, and even though these are voiceless machines of death, I kind of feel bad slamming them around. Also, when did West Virginia get so many robots? It’s like a sci-fi amusement park out here!

I spent an evening’s play session actually spending time building up my base and crafting. I took a cue from one of the loading screens to make this accessible half-building that contains everything I need: a bed to rest, stash, workbenches, vending machine, and several turrets to protect me from invaders. The vending machine’s even drawn in other players, one of whom was nice enough to gift me a set of crafting plans free of charge.

I was really intrigued by the latest patch’s introduction of the Pioneer Scouts, so I made a very long journey to the Scout camp to join up. While I did get a uniform and several quest prompts, I quickly realized that I was too low-level to complete most of it. I guess my backpack’s going to need to wait until another day!

Without any NPCs or cutscenes, environmental storytelling has to carry the heavy burden of narrative in Fallout 76 — for better and for worse. One cemetery contained what looked like the remnants of a death/wicker cult, with tons of corpses having drank rat poison and these weird statues everywhere. Yet there was no explanation, quest, or resolution, which left me unsatisfied.

WE WILL NEVER FORGET YOU MR. PEBBLES

While I love exploring smaller and more intimate locales, I’m less crazy about huge industrial spaces, like this nuclear power plant. To make matters worse, this place was mined all over the entrance, and I blew myself up no less than three times trying to get in there. I hate mines.

It was only after a few days of play in City of Heroes did I realize that the server that I had been on — Halcyon — was designated to become a European server after some shard moves. That would not be great for me in terms of ping and other players to be with, so without much fanfare, I rerolled on the Torchbearer server.

And since I was rerolling, I figured it was time to remake one of my favorite characters from Ye Olde Dayz, an Illusion/Dark Controller named Yeti Yesterday. In fact, when I poured back through my City of Heroes posts on Bio Break (which date back to 2008), I see that I used this name/character a lot.

My vision for her was the ultimate 80s girl, so I spent wayyyy too much time looking over all of the options to find the most 80s-looking options available. I think I did good by the hairstyle and headband, and the leg warmers and shiny sleeveless puffy jacket pulled the outfit together. I even gave her a sparkles aura to summon the spirit of Jem (as I am totally outrageous).

Probably the main reason that I always gravitated to this combination of powersets is that it offered — at least on blueside — the most pets of any class. Illusion had a few situational pets, while Dark Miasma brings out a pet in its final tier. I can’t recall actually ever GETTING to that final tier back in the day, but it’s possible that it did happen.

Anyway, I’m very pleased to have returned to this because so many of my memories of playing this game are with Illusion controllers. I remember back when City of Heroes first launched and I poured over the manual trying to figure out which powersets I’d be choosing when I got home that day. There were many tempting choices, but the unique slant of illusion — thematically and functionally — won out. And I never regretted that.

I had forgotten how much fun it was to blind enemies and see them grab their heads as light shone in their faces. Being able to lock bad guys down so that they don’t hurt your team felt much more powerful than just slinging damage their way, and this kind of group crowd control is sadly fading into the past in MMO history.

I am a little mystified over the lack of supergroups and supergroup recruitment — I still haven’t figured out if this is something these servers lack right now or if nobody really cares about forming these. Again, looking back over my posts from when the game was operational back in the day, I saw a repeated refrain that my inability to find a good supergroup hindered my long-term viability.

In any case, I try to be friendly with the teams that I join, and I’m really getting a kick out of the different outfits that others create. My son even got into the fun, creating his own winged lizard Spike/Invulnerable Scrapper. I mean, if you were a 10-year-old boy, what would you make? Fire Dolly up there? Maybe you would, I dunno.

]]>https://biobreak.wordpress.com/2019/05/23/city-of-heroes-yeti-yesterday-reborn/feed/0SypVampire Bloodlines: Grim grinning ghostshttps://biobreak.wordpress.com/2019/05/22/vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-grim-grinning-ghosts/
https://biobreak.wordpress.com/2019/05/22/vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-grim-grinning-ghosts/#commentsWed, 22 May 2019 13:00:41 +0000http://biobreak.wordpress.com/?p=36324Continue reading →]]>(This is part of my journey going playing through 2004’s Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines. You can follow the entire series on the Retro Gaming page.)

Every good RPG has at least one area that helps to establish the game’s legacy, and for Bloodlines, it has to be the Ocean Hotel. While slightly hokey and crude by today’s standards, back when this game released it was a genuinely terrifying level that was right up there with your Silent Hills and Resident Evils of the day. It had me pretty freaked out playing through it when I was younger, and even now I can appreciate it as a second cousin to The Secret World.

Anyway, what we have here is a mission to enter a haunted hotel that is definitely, certainly, most assuredly not trying to be the Overlook Hotel from Stephen King’s The Shining. Except it totally is, and that is OK.

There are no enemies to fight anywhere in this place, although you don’t know that the first time going in. No, what this level is about is trying to unsettle you through jump scares and excellent sound design. The hotel seems hellbent on keeping you away from the pendant you’re tasked with retrieving, and it’s not above flinging furniture, slamming doors, and playing with light switches to accomplish this.

Every once in a while, you get a flash of a ghost running through the place. This is not a very welcome scene, as it typically happens when you’re navigating the dark shadows of the basement. I had to reload a couple of times to be fast enough on the screenshot key to get her. Looks like she’s being chased, doesn’t it?

Through a handful of newspaper clippings littered around this burned-out hotel, a backstory starts to emerge. Looks like a whole family died here, and they did not die well.

Even as the hotel works against you — and it really does, from floors opening up under you to elevator cars crashing down on your head — this female ghost gradually makes it clear that she’s kind of on your side. She wants you to make it, and as such, she appears to point out places for you to go and things to see.

Hey! It’s the Happy Grinny Family!

So yeah, this being the Shining and all, apparently this locket ended up corrupting the mind of the dad over the course of a vacation and turned him all murdery. He went after his wife and kids and… well, there was an axe involved. Plus fire. The moral of this story is, don’t ever trust jewelry with cursed stats.

The dad — now an evil poltergeist — isn’t too pleased that I keep making progress. While the things he flings at me hurt, my ever-regenerating health bar (thanks, vampire blood!) keeps it from being an actual threat. It’s more psychological than anything else.

Probably the coolest part of this entire level is when I got to the kitchen and the poltergeist goes NUTS, flinging everything all around the place while playing with the gas jets on the stove. It’s pretty crazy to see in action, and it goes on for a long time. Guess that’s what happens when you have a hissy fit.

Eventually I get to the penthouse, where I’m thrown back in time (?) for a brief moment before the murders and am able to grab the pendant. Does this mean that I changed the course of history? From returning to the present to see the hotel — now empty — as much in shambles as it ever was, I guess not. Hopefully I put some spirits to rest, though.

Here’s a fun Bloodlines fact: This room is the ONLY place in the entire game that shows sunlight/daylight. Drink it up, you creatures of the night!

So why Blade & Soul? There’s no particularly strong reason why I chose this for my next MMO experience, just that it seemed like it had a solid following, has been putting out a lot of updates, and was from the classic MMO studio that’s already canceled some of my favorite games. So why not?

I’ll admit that eastern MMOs have an uphill battle with me. I don’t dislike the cultures that these games represent, but it’s not one that I strongly identify with or fantasize about. There’s a lot about anime and eastern animation that makes me roll my eyes and feel like we’ve seen this a million times before… and here’s a million and one, because Blade & Soul is not going to tread on any new ground. You’re the last surviving student of a super-awesome dojo that was betrayed and razed to the ground. Now, you got to be super-awesome for everyone.

Tired tropes aside, Blade & Soul gets off to a very strong start. First of all, character creation is absolutely wonderful, with a nice selection of classes, races, and visual customization from which to choose. My only quibble was that there are some class/race lockouts, such as the Summoner only going to the tiny girl-people.

And then the game surprised me with a strong cinematic start. In fact, the whole first hour plays out more like an extended martial arts game cutscene than an MMO, with some tutorial stuff interspersing a LOT of mini-movies. It definitely raises the tension and stakes right off the bat instead of the slow-burn that most MMOs choose to cultivate. While I did like it, I thought that the initial story was rushed, a little confusing (why is everyone calling me “Cricket” now? Why did that little guy with the bunny ears turn into a big guy with bunny ears?), and didn’t allow for much time to explore or choose a path.

Blade & Soul gets high marks on eye candy, and while it’s no Black Desert or anything, it had me doing the “guy nod of approval” (you know, frown a little, raise your eyebrows, and bob your head a little). At least it was nice to look at, and once the game showed me that my character was capable of gliding (some… how) right from level one, I got a kick out of taking that mode of transportation to every quest destination.

WHEEE! Kind of makes me feel bad I never got a glider in Guild Wars 2…

Combat wasn’t hard to grasp — this is an action MMO we’re talking about, here, so lots of mouse clicking and the occasional hotkey for specials. I went with a Warlock, so she had these cool floating pamphlets while attacking and even a really wicked-looking Asian demon as an occasional summon.

But Blade & Soul has a lot of small little nuances that I didn’t get right away (or, you know, ever). The tutorial would fling things at me really fast and then with no follow-up I’d find myself confused. So how do I get new skills? Or upgrade them? Is… that something I should do? Oh well, I’ll just go back to mouse clicking and hope I’ll win. Yay, I won.

Eventually the tutorial period is over and the game settles into a calmer, more traditional RPG opening. You know the type: peaceful village, trite quests, “Oh you’re awake? You look strong. You’re now recruited to protect us!”

So as I go through a few more quests, here are a few additional and random thoughts from Blade and Soul:

The user interface is a hot mess — it’s an eyesore of sprawling elements and has the largest minimap I’ve ever seen in an MMO.

It takes so, so long to log into this game. Not sure why, as I haven’t had this problem with any other MMO on my computer. Probably about a five minute load time for me.

There’s some good voice acting — but a lot of cringy acting too.

Beautiful loading screens!

I could do without the computer loudly announcing things to me like “THE SCREENSHOT HAS BEEN SAVED” and “THERE ARE NEW ITEMS IN THE HONGMOON STORE.” Kind of immersion breaking, and my immersion wasn’t too deep to begin with.

If you’re looking for a quest pattern other than the “epic story arc broken up by a handful of scattered side quests,” then go elsewhere. That’s pretty much the pattern here, like it or not.

The equipment system absolutely baffles me from an initial cursory glance. This is where the game really differs from contemporaries and requires a bit of a learning curve.

So from what I can tell, it’s not a terrible game, just not one that pulled me in and made me hungry for more. Has some charm, but feels a little too rote and tropish for my tastes.

What motivates you to log on and play an MMO? We all have various answers to that which depend on the time and situation, but typically the answers are (1) the social connections, (2) the experience of story, (3) achieving personal goals, or (4) obtaining rewards such as levels, gear, and useful items. The more motivation, the more compelled I am to jump into a game. The less, then it depends if I want to play or not.

I’ve been thinking about this lately in my LOTRO adventures. I feel stalled out right now, with nothing new to do at the endgame until the next update comes out and nothing new to achieve on my progression server character until the next unlock happens. Both should be early/mid summer. And with the anniversary content done earlier than expected, I’m left puttering around Lothlorien on my goat, doing quests not for rewards, not for XP, but merely for the experience of doing them. And while it is a pleasant enough zone, the Elf fetch-and-do quests are the epitome of fluff. Go pick flowers. Go pick mushrooms. Go pick berries. Go meditate. Go light candles. We’re too lazy, we’re Elves, you do all the hard work you Hobbitsy thing.

Whenever I get into a situation like this in an MMO, it calls for various solutions to stave off burnout. Playing less is certainly an option (and one I’ll be pursuing this month as I branch off into other online games). Setting other goals is another one, as is simply exploring the world and paying more attention to detail.

For example, whilst going around Bree doing anniversary content, I took a look through this gate into a section of town that none of us have ever — or will ever — go into. Makes me really want to see what might be back there in this rich section, but alas, I’m a mere dirty adventurer.

Or I was reminded of this little Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle easter egg in the turtle house — you can see the nunchuck next to one turtle and a rat up on the rock. LOTRO doesn’t have that many of these pop culture references, especially in comparison to other MMOs, and the ones it does boast are usually pretty low-key like this.

At least this prodded me in the direction of Bingo Boffin, whom I had last left in Rivendell. I spent a few nights catching up on his questline throughout Eregion and Moria — oh Willem Whisker, where are you off to now? As always, these were a refreshing break from the more serious LOTRO epic story. My only regret is that there isn’t some way to farm Bingo Badges so that I’d have enough currency to buy everything I wanted from Bert.

(This is part of my journey going playing through 2004’s Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines. You can follow the entire series on the Retro Gaming page.)

And welcome back to the freakshow that is Bloodlines! I really like how this game excels in starting you at the very bottom of the ladder in this new-to-you and mysterious society and then encourages you to work your way up. So while the opening area isn’t as high stakes nor too difficult, the quests and characters still manage to be pretty interesting. Honestly, it reminds me a LOT of The Secret World’s approach.

The centerpiece of Santa Monica is the Asylum, a club for vampires and their lackeys. It’s a nice safe zone with a couple of “blood dolls” who don’t mind being fed upon and filling up your blood meter, which takes a lot of the pressure off of having to maintain this. Plus, I met Jeanette, one of the twin sister owner/operators of the establishment. She’s easily the most recognizable character from the game, having been featured on the box and promotional art. My character calls her a “two-faced daughter of Janus,” which is a lot more shrewd than you’d think for a crazy Malkavian.

Among my humble origin quests include working for a local bounty hunter to track down a few people, which is well and fine with me. I also help out E, a “thin blood” vampire who wants to find his sire, who turns out to be captured my the local blood bank for forceable extraction. She gets hers, though, by going totally feral on a nurse when you release her from the chair.

Going back to the bounty hunter, one of his quests sends me looking for a guy who vanished — right into the basement of a very suspicious prosthetics dealer. So yeah, the guy not only sells prosthetic limbs, but he kidnaps and amputates from others for some reason. Maybe to drive up sales? You’d think that people would be a little reluctant to return. Anyway, he’s dead now, so don’t worry on that front.

There are a lot of side quests to do (which I attempt, because I need the XP to level up my skills), as well as a main storyline to follow. This begins with a beat-up ghoul named Mercurio, who asks me to recover some stolen explosives from a local drug den.

Much like Deus Ex, Bloodlines offers many approaches to level objectives based on your play type and skills. For example, the drug den level can be cleared out by force (the obvious choice) or by social skills (seduction/intimidation) or by stealth. I was going to stealth, but I got spotted and decided to see how many I could take out with just a knife.

All of them, it turns out.

Next on the main storyline is a quest to make peace between a local Nosferatu (super ugly vampires) and Theresa, the other owner of the Asylum. She’s willing to forgive and forget if I’m able to help her secure a spoooooooooky haunted house that she wants to renovate and flip on the market.

OK, so spoilers in this last paragraph, but this whole series is spoilers so oh well. The big reveal that will happen later is that Jeanette and Theresa are, in fact, the same person. I forgot this until I got to this room and heard the arguing through the door, then saw the one room split into two for each personality. Then recall happened, and I have to say that when you know this fact, talking with either one or listening to them “argue” takes on a whole different subtext.

When you read this, it’s probably been three to six months since you wrote this. The MMO world is alight with buzz over FFXIV: Shadowbringers and about half of your friends are playing it. You’ve probably forgotten — weak as your mind is — the last time you played, and so you’ve decided to comb back through your blog post history on this game to refresh your mind.

That’s why I’m writing this. That’s why I’m here to remind you that, just as much as you’re not a fan of feta cheese on salads, you just don’t like Final Fantasy XIV — and you need to stop trying to make it happen.

Trust me, I know what you’re thinking. I’m you, after all, just the you of your past. I know that, on paper, FFXIV checks off many of the boxes of “must haves” for an MMO. It’s got a strong story emphasis, a thriving population, a tab-targeting combat scheme, a robust housing system, the ability to switch classes, and a community that’s kind of crazy about fashion.

And so since enough time has gone by, you’re probably thinking that you just haven’t given it the fair shot you should. Maybe, just maybe, you can crack that code if you can approach the game with a fresh perspective or a different way to play.

The problem, dear Syp, is that you simply don’t like this game. Be honest with yourself — you really have given it more than a fair shot over, what, three years and 300 days of subscription time. You had some fun, met some great friends, and enjoyed it for a spell. But ultimately, every single time you came to the same conclusion as I am right now, that it’s just not the game for you.

Maybe it’s the aesthetics or the ploddingly slow story and combat. It definitely doesn’t help that despite that out of a dozen or so classes, you like pretty much none of them. The pieces may be good, but the combination doesn’t please you. And so every time you end up subbing for a month or so, only to become disillusioned with the taste of this game and wander away, out $12 and several hours that could’ve been spent better in other games.

It’s time to call it quits with FFXIV. It’s perfectly OK for others to like it, bashing it is not why I’m writing this. I’m just trying to remind you that your MMO gaming path going forward probably shouldn’t include this game, even if it does end up being the last title standing. Branch out. Try something new. Check out some older proven favorites. But your time here is done.

Ever since City of Heroes came back via the emulation scene, I’ve been waiting for an opportune time to jump back into this old favorite MMO. There’s still a very real possibility that NCsoft is willing to deal or make some sort of legal concession to legitimize these servers, so I was holding off to see if that would develop and if there’d be one more stable server in the end than the others.

But as we continue to wait on that front, it does appear that the Homecoming emulator is doing an admirable job gathering together the community and being the focal point of new and returning heroes. Every time I check, there’s around 6,000 people jumping into this game on the various servers, and that’s not insignificant. So why not me? Why not me indeed.

I figured that until whatever happens in the future happens, I’d limit myself for now to just one character played casually to get my footing. There wasn’t even a question of what that character would be, as I was a huge fan of the Dark/Dark Defender back in the day. So please give a warm Bio Break welcome to Lights Out!

After setting up my options and getting the controls and chat windows the way I liked them, then came the question of… what to do next? You see, the last time I seriously played City of Heroes, it was probably 2006. Or 2007? In any case, I hadn’t been around much for the free-to-play/Paragon Studios era for various reasons, and so this more new incarnation of the game is a little bit unknown to me. Plus, given the distance of time between when I had last regularly played, I had a lot of catching up to do.

For example, City of Heroes doesn’t throw exclamation points and obvious quest chains at you from the get-go. I wandered around aimlessly for a while, beating up random street thugs before vaguely recalling the idea of contacts and door missions. I rung up a contact — free teleport right to him, that was nice — and ran a pretty standard solo instance.

But City of Heroes was never about being by yourself — the game was always more fun in groups. So I turned to the Looking for Group channel, and saw that pretty much everyone was gathering together for DFB, or Death from Below. I guess this is an Issue 21 sewer mission that offers a very good rate of XP gain for minimal risk, which is why the community has flocked to it. Never underestimate MMO players from taking the easiest road possible for power leveling.

It was the only group game in town, and really, if DFB was the only functional combat part of the game, I’d still be obscenely happy to be playing COH again. So this past weekend I ran this repeatedly with several groups, getting to know the rhythms of my class and group combat all over again. I also had mild PTSD flashbacks to the barrage of sound and light that vomits all over the place during these fights.

Inspirations? Enhancements? I remember those! Inventions? Er… I think they started to come out when I played? Badges, temporary powers… ahh, this is the good stuff.

DFB did rocket me up from level 3 to 16 within a few runs, and I appreciated that I could grab flight and some other essential grouping powers quickly. Instead of fighting, I spent my time in groups tossing out debuffs on the enemies and heals and buffs on our team. That’s the Defender playstyle that I liked.

However, it did make me crave a more varied experience, because I don’t think I could run this one trial forever without eventually losing interest in this game. I’m starting a search for supergroups that are devoted to more traditional door mission experiences, so hopefully I’ll find a more permanent home among likeminded players. And then?

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet: Combined, these forces create the awesome power of Roy G. Biv — otherwise known as the rainbow! In today’s experimental episode of the Battle Bards, Steff, Syl, and Syp attempt to find MMORPG music tracks to go with each of the seven colors that shine over a rainstorm or in a particularly oily puddle. It’s a daunting mission, but these three are just crazy enough to finish it!

]]>https://biobreak.wordpress.com/2019/05/15/battle-bards-episode-144-colors-of-the-rainbow/feed/0SypFallout 76: Giving the end of the world another shothttps://biobreak.wordpress.com/2019/05/14/fallout-76-giving-the-end-of-the-world-another-shot/
https://biobreak.wordpress.com/2019/05/14/fallout-76-giving-the-end-of-the-world-another-shot/#respondTue, 14 May 2019 13:00:32 +0000http://biobreak.wordpress.com/?p=36277Continue reading →]]>

It’s probably safe to say that Fallout 76 was a disappointment to many when it came out last year due to a combination of poor decisions. The biggest of these were bugs, trying to create a weird MMO hybrid design that failed to be social in the least, a lack of a true VATS combat system, and cumbersome PC controls. Bethesda barely gives PC players a second thought, and it shows in the questionable keybinds and inventory UI in its games.

Anyway, while I was disappointed with a game that I had hoped would fill that post-apocalyptic MMO hunger I had, I never thought it was a complete wash — and I was encouraged by hearing the odd report of players who had stuck with it and found a lot of good among the bad. So it was on my radar to return to when it got a few bolstering patches under its hood, and, well, here I am.

Since I never got very far into the game, I had no problems starting over and trying to take this game at face value as a survival-model RPG. This meant slowly progressing through areas, picking up everything not nailed down, scrapping junk, and building up a base of operations. I love the *idea* of a base more than how Fallout 76 institutes it, mainly due (again) to Bethesda’s horrible interface. It’s workable, just not very user friendly. At least this time around I’m sort of getting it and finding that crafting stuff isn’t as difficult as I had made out in my mind.

I’ve also been relying on a melee weapon for these early hours, since it’s usually more than enough for the enemies that I encounter and it saves ammo for a more needed later date. The first play session that I had in the game, another player emoted at me and then left a nice baseball bat for me in an Overseer’s Cache. That’s come in real handy, and I’ve had some fun knocking robots around with it.

Shown: An awesome player base made by Not Me. Not shown: My base, which is a sad, pathetic wooden platform with a couple of things on it.

The more I play, the more the absence of both other players in any large number and the absence of NPCs creates an odd, isolating feel. I’m not a fan. I don’t need tons of either people or friendly mobs, but it’s bizarre how the game bends itself into knots to never show people (you’re usually Too Late to save the humans in any given area) and I don’t get why there aren’t zone chat windows, better grouping tools, or guilds. Any of those would’ve brought the community together, but as it is, I just forget that this is a multiplayer game at all. And that is sad.

The redeeming nature of the game is in that classic Fallout exploration loop. It’s just fun to explore these different thematic areas, such as a wilderness camp that included a ropes and obstacle course and several cabins. I almost made it to the end of the ropes course but kept falling due to the terrible platforming controls.

Looking at the map, I’ve only explored a very small area in total, mostly because I have to keep returning to base camp to offload materials as I get weighed down. I did rejoice the day I found an actual (robot) vendor to buy some of this stuff I’d been saving, as caps are hard to come by in this version of the game.

Another fun activity is playing dress up. In addition to armor pieces, there are certain outfits that can be acquired and equipped. Here I am wearing priest’s vestments (with a Bible tucked in the back, natch). Figured that would be somewhat appropriate!